Lint error: Multiple licenses resolve to LGPL-2 about reuse-tool

[carmenbianca]

This is because the spec now assumes that a license always has a file extension. The Linux kernel doesn't use file extensions for their licenses.

In and of itself, this wouldn't really be a problem, other than LGPL-2.0 being detected as LGPL-2 with the .0 file extension. But the real problem here is that there is both an LGPL-2.0 and an LGPL-2.1 file, both resolving to LGPL-2.

I would like to fix this in the tool, somehow, but I'm not sure what an elegant solution is. It might be possible to do the following steps:

• If a license file has a name (e.g., LICENSES/GPL-3.0-or-later, without .txt) that matches a license on the SPDX License List, simply accept that license file. This used to be the case in 0.3.x, and is trivially easy to implement.

• Warn the user about this happening. Trivially easy.

• Somehow make the linter aware that this error occured, and make the linter fail. A little more difficult to implement, but certainly not impossible.

[mxmehl]

As an intermediate solution, your options 1 and 2 seem to be sufficient and don't contradict our principles generally. AFAIK we already have a few undocumented exceptions for Linux

[carmenbianca]

They weren't separate options. They were steps that belong together :)

The main question is: Should the lint fail if the licenses have no file extensions? The specification mentions they should, so I'm thinking the linter should fail. But this is such a trivial thing that I'm not sure…

[carmenbianca]

Ah, to be sure, the linter should (almost) never crash: The current behaviour is not very desireable and should be fixed regardless. When I say that the linter fails or not, I mean the report at the end.

[mxmehl]

Ah ok! Well then, that sounds like a good plan.

I agree that the linter should not crash. That also makes debugging the API harder (that's where I found out about this error, and since we do not parse stderr it wasn't that trivial to debug ;) )